


Cat gut

by rekishi



Category: Gattaca (1997)
Genre: Gen, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 04:42:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rekishi/pseuds/rekishi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How did the world come to be as it is now?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cat gut

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Yvi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yvi/gifts).



Nobody knew where it had first happened. The history books say it was London, where a baby girl was born without a genetic defect that would have likely doomed the woman she would become to a battle against breast cancer. Preimplantation diagnostics, PID.

In truth, though, the road began long before that, with the birth of the first babies who had been fertilized not in a woman's body but in a reaction tube, in vitro fertilization, IVF, or intracytoplasmatic sperm injection, ICSI. That is when we started walking the long path towards designing our offspring according to our own wishes. And just wishing is enough to make it true, it seems these days.

After that British baby girl was born without a predisposition for breast cancer, the selection against other genetic defects started. Prostate and intestinal cancer were next, scourges of industrialized nations that they were, and screening started to turn into engineering. The serious, but much less common genetic defects started disappearing next: androgen insensitivity syndrome, 5-alpha reductase deficiency, Huntington's disease. Only a few years later, children were born who would never develop Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease even when they were very old; the removal of the amyloid plagues before they could even begin to form was celebrated as a breakthrough.

PID became extremely affordable. It was around that time that would-be parents started to come to the specialists when they wanted to get pregnant. Once, only a few percent of couples wanted or needed help conceiving. The number increased drastically within a mere five years. Suddenly 80 percent of couples who wished for children would not do it manually anymore. Almost everyone, after all, had cases of genetic defects or old-age diseases in their families if they looked far enough back in their family trees.

Perhaps around that time, the national ethic committees should have intervened. But all the scientists and scientific counselors to governments said it was a good thing,. The future population would be healthier, able to work longer in their lifetimes, suffer less, be less of a burden for everyone else. And so it continued. Other defects were removed. The year adipositas was taken care of, the numbers increased yet further. Now 90 percent of children were born after PID and tinkering. That's the word that was used, tinkering. Harmless sounding, like applying make-up to get rid of a pimple.

Speaking of pimples, acne development was removed twenty years after that first PID girl, in the same year as myopia. Aging, as a physical characteristic of people older and wiser, was left intact, because now that it didn't signify the prospect of wasting away into disability, aging could take place in dignity for the new generations.

Fifty years after a girl without a mutation in her BRCA1 gene had been born, the first human female with a perfect genetic make-up was delivered, free from any thing that might have hampered her from being the perfect woman. She was named Eve.


End file.
